


give me back all my time

by firstaudrina



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Photography, Post series but pre coda, Sapphic September
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26260393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Since she lost her memories, Clary has been really into taking pictures. She doesn’t realize The Girl has shown up in multiple photographs until her professor points it out, peering through her negatives. “Found a muse?”
Relationships: Clary Fray & Isabelle Lightwood, Clary Fray & Rebecca Lewis, Clary Fray/Isabelle Lightwood
Comments: 21
Kudos: 87





	give me back all my time

Since she lost her memories, Clary has been really into taking pictures. It’s like she’s trying to hold onto things before they get away from her again. She wants to make sure there’s tangible proof of her existence, captured quicker than her hands can do with pencil and paint. 

No one can fill that gap of lost time for her. No one knows where she was. She woke up inside her own head in a ballgown in the middle of a park, her cheeks wet but her mind calm. She’d never experienced something like that before: physically crying when your brain has no idea why you’re crying. There was a disconnect in her body for weeks after that. She didn’t cry when she found out her home was a burned-out shell or her best friend was dead or her mom and Luke were gone forever. She couldn’t trust her body’s reactions anymore.

“I don’t know, Red,” Becky says in a fretful way, her hands twisting together. “You just vanished!”

Her other friends say the same thing. The way Maureen tells it, Clary and Simon fell off the face of the earth. They stopped coming to the coffee shop and never showed up for classes. Maureen tried to report it but it was like the cops weren’t interested. Luke’s old partner, who doesn’t seem to be around anymore either, told her not to worry about it. She’d been angry at Simon, so she hadn’t. She feels bad now, but Clary doesn’t hold it against her. It was like everyone got zapped up in the Rapture except for her.

“And me!” Becky says. “Unless you count a misguided semester at Florida State, which I guess you kind of could.”

Clary has been living with Becky since she got back, but not right away. She got an insurance payout from the fire and an inheritance, somehow; money that just appeared for her. She crashed in temporary places for a while — AirBnBs, hotels, one-month rentals. Then Becky came back to New York and they found a place together. Clary went back to art school and let her life fall into some kind of rhythm, let the past drift away because she couldn’t touch it anyway. She couldn’t let it touch her or she’d fall apart all over again. Her therapist tells her art is a good way to channel her feelings, so Clary throws herself into every kind of art.

Her sketches look so real sometimes that she imagines she could reach into them and pull the subject out, whether it’s a bowl of fruit or an artfully-shadowed cup. She paints a whole set of tarot cards as a gift for nobody; she would have given them to Dot, if Dot was around to receive them. Clary takes a sculpture course and has clay under her nails for weeks. She makes the oddest things, producing tiny clay swords and wands studded with real crystal from this witchy little shop near her apartment. 

“Oh,” Becky says, seeming perplexed or maybe just trying to hide the fact that she doesn’t like them, “Cooool.”

Clary never thought much about taking photos in the Time Before. A snapshot was mere habit, an extension of the phone always in her fingers: a picture of that biscotti, a selfie with Simon. She doesn’t have her old phone or computer, so she lost all those thoughtless records. For weeks she hadn’t wanted to fill the emptiness with anything new because everything felt temporary, but then she needed to document everything so it wouldn’t feel temporary anymore. 

Clary does a series of self-portraits-as-therapy, dressing herself up as angels and devils, then cutting the pictures up and repasting them in a fractured collage. It’s nothing her art professors would be into, but it makes her feel better because it looks like her insides — a jagged eye there, the edge of a feathered wing from the all-year Halloween store.

But she really finds her niche when she turns the camera around. Her favorite thing to do on her lunch break, the hour-ish she built into her schedule between morning and afternoon classes, is to go sit somewhere with her food and take pictures of everyone who passes her. Sometimes she gets a lot of blurry bullshit, but sometimes she gets really good ones — like this pensive blonde guy standing next to a tough girl with short curly hair who looked right at the camera when Clary took the picture. There’s something about the guy that’s sort of see-through, maybe overexposed, like he’s not really there. She likes that. 

Clary loves developing film, the strange chemical smell of it that’s almost metallic. It makes her think of some memory she can’t quite put her finger on. Maybe visiting that colonial village in grade school; the smell of the blacksmith’s forge. She like framing her prints in the clunky, old-fashioned machine and dipping them one after another in solution. It’s like pulling a memory right out of her head and making it real. That would be cool; that would be helpful. That would really clear up a lot for Clary.

She diversifies, switches from black and white to color. She carts the camera around to dinner with her new friends. She captures their faces, still strange to her but growing dearer. She likes club nights because the results are so unusual, the neon splintering her pictures in bright colored flashes. She gets one picture of a guy with an ear cuff that almost makes his eyes look orange. 

Clary doesn’t realize The Girl has shown up in multiple pictures until her professor points it out, peering through her negatives. “Found a muse?”

Clary looks, and yes: it’s the same Girl at the club in a skin-tight bandage dress with a fall of dark hair; the same Girl on the blonde guy’s other side, looking almost completely away from the camera; the same Girl in the park outside the rundown church Clary photographs sometimes. 

“Maybe a stalker,” Clary jokes, but there’s a hooked feeling low in her stomach, a jolt like being dragged forward. Something is important but she doesn’t know what it is.

After enough gentle nudging from Becky, Clary starts dating. She endures bland drinks with guys from school, but her eyes are always scanning crowds for girls now, girls with long dark hair and big dark eyes, girls with smiling red-painted mouths, girls in tight black clothes and towering heels. Eventually she makes eyes at enough girls that she goes out with a few of them, too, but she never feels that same hook below her stomach. None of them are who she’s looking for.

Clary lays several prints out on the rug in front of the coffee table and pours over them, arms wrapped around herself. “Who do you think she is?” she asks Becky. “Do you think she knows something?”

_Do you think she knows me?_ is what she means.

Becky is furiously texting someone and not paying her much attention. “No, Red. Don’t go all Pepe Silvia on me. Are you sure that’s even the same girl? Lotta brunettes in New York City.”

She barely looks at the pictures, not that Clary needs her to. She knows it’s the same girl, because it’s undeniable, from the beauty mark above her lip to the playful curve of her eyebrow.

Clary is so on edge for the sight of a leather jacket and night-dark hair that she jumps at every brunette she passes. Maybe that’s why she almost misses the girl the next time they come lens-to-face. Clary is sitting by the coffee kiosk next to the big cube at Astor Place, camera trained towards St. Mark’s so she can snap a few shots of the punks, when suddenly she’s there — appearing out of nowhere, in the blink of an eye. She’s looking right at Clary.

But when Clary lowers the camera, she startles, caught. Then she turns sharply on her heel and hurries down the street, almost swallowed up by the crowd.

Clary hurries after her, leaving her half-drunk coffee behind. She bumps into people and maneuvers past them, offering tossed-off apologies but too focused on not losing sight of the girl. Clary had seen something like recognition in her face, mingled with shock. She turns a corner and Clary skates after her, throng thinned out enough that she can call, “Hey!”

The girl tenses, but takes a few more steps before she stops. “You can see me?”

It’s not what Clary expects. “Of course. You’re hard to miss.”

The girl almost smiles.

Clary is going to ask _do you know me?_ but what comes out is, “Do I know you?”

The girl’s lips draw together, not quite pursing or pressing, just a perfect red bow. She shakes her hair over her shoulders. “No,” she says stridently. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.” 

She turns away again, but there was a little waver in her voice, an odd spot where the words were worn thin. It sounded like stepping on an old creak in the stairs, a familiar hurt trod over and over. Unthinkingly, Clary reaches out to catch her and she feels that rollercoaster drop, that hook. She knows without knowing why that she has touched this girl before, a million times. Her hand knows the shape of this shoulder. She thinks, _Isabelle._ Then she says it.

“Iz?”

And Isabelle says, “Clary.”

Clary has spent months trying to solve for X in her own mind, but she thinks this is the variable she’d been missing: two letters, a name, and a girl who makes her feel like crying without knowing why.


End file.
